Strong opinions. Candid advice.

Do You Need a CDP for Golden Customer Records?

30-Oct-2018

Everyone wants an aggregated interface into their customer data — a unified view of definitive or "golden" customer data and segments to deploy across all engagement channels. To get there, you have to aggregate the data from a variety of sources, then clean and disambiguate it.

Historically, most enterprises have tried to do this work themselves, often via traditional data warehouse approaches. In the last 3-5 years, we’ve seen a dramatic expansion of packaged Customer Data Platform (CDP) vendors move into this space.

The Vendor Landscape

Today, there's no lack of choices. But what will work specifically for you will really depends on your use case scenarios.

In RSG's logo landscape, we showcase the pure play platforms versus suite vendors. The former tend to focus more on managing that persistent golden record, while the latter tend to emphasize "data bus" integration services among various tools within that vendor's suite.

The CDP Evolution

The Digital Marketing stack is evolving and CDPs are part of that evolution. Vendors are jockeying for market position; some CDP providers are expanding their offerings beyond managing core data into decision support and campaign orchestration. You'll want to carefully evaluate the scope of what you want from a CDP, depending on your broader MarTech architecture.